The great strength of ecology is that it deals with living things in terms of their natural surroundings rather than in artificial isolation. Other branches of biology focus upon particular aspects of organisms and may thereby lose the reality of connections and interrelationships that are vital to understanding life in its entirety. Ecology, by its very nature of focusing on the context within which organisms develop and function, brings together a variety of disciplines. Evolution, which provides a central structure in the study of biology, can be fully appreciated only from the ecological vantage point of populations interacting with their environment.Anatomy, systematics, biochemistry, and even molecular biology becomemore fully focused when utilized in analyses of ecosystems.Onamore practical level, the study of existing ecosystems has vitalized the conservation movement and enhanced the active effort to maintain ecosystems or even individual species of plants or animals threatened with extinction. Apossible weakness of ecology stems from the broad spectrum of its concerns—it tends to be diffuse. Individual ecologists do focus on particular aspects of communities or the physical environment but the novice might find the field daunting by its very breadth. In its descriptive phase, that breadth was more easily handled.The recentemphasis on experimentation tends to encourage a specialization within the field but experimentation introduces another problem. With experimentation, controlled conditions may not be readily obtained in a field situation. Ecosystems can be studied froma passive approach, in which the experimenter merely observes such phenomena as energy flow, diversity of species, etc., but more ambitious attempts to establish an ecological science require interventions that may be difficult to isolate and control. Some success has been achieved, particularly where clear boundaries to a habitat exist, such as on islands